Chris Ofili Quotes

#1. Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

Jerry Saltz

#2. There's a magic that comes from playing entirely to who you are. I've got my specialist subject - in the Mastermind sense - and I wouldn't change it, or who I am.

Chris Ofili

#3. There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically.

Chris Ofili

#4. The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

Chris Ofili

#5. I'll never forget my first words in the theatre. "Peanuts. Popcorn."

Henny Youngman

#6. On some days in prison you might just need to get out of there, but on some days - not all days, but some - you might be able to see the sky and see the blue in it.

Uzo Aduba

#7. I'm aware that success can overwhelm you. The perception of you can be elevated to such a status that it's not you any more.

Chris Ofili

#8. Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ... in school was a bit of a bore.

Al Pacino

#9. Bid me come, and here I am. Shape my being, and for a short time I can move mortal air in and out of my chest. Ask me to love you, Bright Light, and you make real a dream-giver's deepest desire.

Jennifer Ashley

#10. In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint. It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people.

Chris Ofili

#11. The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

Chris Ofili

#12. Sometimes, as I feel a door or an exit point in my work is closing, I'll try to create an opening so as not to stifle the creative process, which I see as a process that's never-ending.

Chris Ofili

#13. And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves, a very short time hence.

Kenneth Grahame

#14. You're just using me for my body." "You don't have a body," I'd remind him.
"Throw that in my face."
"Technically, you don't have a face either.

Darynda Jones

#15. Often I think changes within my work have been seen as sudden changes or sharp changes, but for me they're not that sudden. They have been there in the studio, but not so much in public.

Chris Ofili

#16. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house, then in a field, ... it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.

John Calvin

#17. Foe means enemy. Now, will we have differences of opinion with the Russians? Yes. Will they get mad at us from time to time, and we get mad at them? That's part of the normal diplomatic relations.

Colin Powell

#18. When I left the Royal College, I decided I would only make paintings that I would want to look at myself, that felt close to my life.

Chris Ofili